About five months into the project, Midway put an early version of its new fighting game on location test in an arcade. It had six characters. Sonya Blade did not exist yet. Ed Boon remembers what happened next in numbers: thirty or forty people crowded around the one cabinet. He has said they were, in his words, literally running around out of excitement.
Boon had spent the 1980s programming pinball machines at Midway, including Black Knight 2000. The team on this game was four people: Boon, the artist John Tobias, a programmer named John Vogel, and Dan Forden, who did the music. The brief was simple. Capcom's Street Fighter II was taking over arcades, and Midway wanted its own fighting game, in about ten months. An earlier idea, a game built around the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, had quickly fizzled.
Before the blood, before anything the game would later be known for, the thing that pulled people in was a punch. 'The big thing was this uppercut,' Boon recalls. When it landed, the screen shook and the opponent flew up into the air. People from the management offices heard about it and came down, asking to see the game.
Fatalities were not part of the plan. 'We didn't have fatalities in mind when we started the first Mortal Kombat game,' Boon has said, and he traces the idea to something he disliked in another popular fighting game: the dizzy state. 'I hated it when someone would get me dizzy, because I knew there was nothing I could do.' So the team moved the idea to the end of the fight. The loser is dizzy. The winner gets one free hit. Then the question became what the winner should do with it.
Tobias remembers the idea arriving by a different road. In his account, the first plan was a finishing move for the final boss only: Shang Tsung would draw his sword and behead his opponent. 'Then we thought, what if the player could do that to his opponent?' The two men describe the origin differently, and neither account cancels the other. Both end at the same place, with the winner standing over a beaten player and a decision to make.
Then came the choice that mattered most, and it was a choice to leave something out. 'We purposefully didn't document how to execute the move,' Boon has said, 'which would add another layer of mystery and intrigue to it.' Tobias has recalled the thinking this way: the button and joystick combinations were going to be so hard that nobody would ever figure them out. Boon's summary was plainer. 'People would have to discover and share how to perform them.'
That is what happened. Mortal Kombat reached arcades in October 1992 with seven characters and seven fatalities, and none of them were printed on the cabinet. Players found them by trying, and told each other. The secret traveled from one person to the next, which no manual could have done.
The attention that followed was not all friendly. In 1993 the U.S. Congress held hearings on violence in video games, and Senator Joseph Lieberman named Mortal Kombat in his opening remarks. In 1994 the industry created the ESRB, North America's first standard rating system for games. The game Boon and Tobias made in about a year had pushed a whole industry to write down what was allowed.
Look at what the two of them wrote down, and what they did not. The rules for the system went into a ratings board. The best move in the game went into nobody's hands except those who stayed at the machine long enough to find it. If you have ever kept something good unlabeled so that a person could meet it without being told, what did you hope they would do when they found it?